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Joseph H. Reich, a financier and philanthropist who with his wife created one of New York City’s first independently run public schools, proving that impoverished students could outperform expectations in such a setting — and which helped to kick-start the city’s charter-school movement — died on Sept. 29 at his home in Sheffield, Mass. He was 89.
The cause was respiratory failure, his daughter Marcia Walsh said.
Convinced that city-run schools were failing to educate students in high-poverty neighborhoods, Mr. Reich (pronounced rich) and his wife, Carol F. Reich, raised $1 million and secured a building, opening the Beginning With Children school in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn in 1992.
It was largely funded with taxpayer money and free to students, but it operated outside the bureaucracy of the local school district.
That model was largely a novelty; it would be another six years until New York State passed the Charter Schools Act, codifying rules for such experiments. The year before that, Beginning With Children had been named the city’s most improved elementary school, a beacon to hundreds of charter schools that would follow.
“We both shared a common and basic belief: Families of means can afford to send their children to private schools or relocate to an affluent neighborhood where public schools have greater resources. The poor cannot,” the Reiches wrote in a mission statement. “We recoiled against this injustice.”
Today, 15 percent of New York City schoolchildren are enrolled in one of the city’s 281 charter schools — though the school choice movement still ignites fiery debates over whether charters siphon off motivated students and money from traditional neighborhood schools.
When the Reiches, an unassuming but determined couple, first became interested in opening a school, Carol described them in an interview with The New York Times as “neophytes in glueland.”
Joseph Reich was a semiretired financier and Carol, who died in 2019, had a doctorate in developmental psychology. They had put three daughters through private schools.
“Joe seems like a clean-cut banker type, until you notice what could be the makings of a respectable ponytail creeping down the back of his neck,” a correspondent for City Journal, a publication of the Manhattan Institute, wrote in a 1994 profile of the couple.
In 1988, through the I Have a Dream program, created by the philanthropist Eugene Lang, the Reiches agreed to pay the college costs for two classes of seventh graders in Williamsburg if they remained in school.
But the couple realized that their young beneficiaries were so far behind academically that the promise of a college education rang hollow.
They came up with the idea for a high-quality elementary school funded by the $6,500 per pupil in taxpayer money that the city then gave public schools, boosted with private donations. It would be completely bilingual, and students would be selected by lottery from the Williamsburg, Greenpoint and Bushwick neighborhoods. It would be run by a coalition of parents, donors and the teachers’ union but remain independent from the local school district.
At first there was vigorous pushback from education bureaucrats, about issues like the size of the windows and the height of the urinals in the donated building on Bartlett Street that Mr. Reich secured from Pfizer Pharmaceuticals. The local school district thought the plan was overly vague and wanted nothing to do with it.
But the Reiches won a buy-in from the city schools chancellor, Joseph A. Fernandez, and, ultimately, from the Board of Education. Their school opened with 50 children after a four-year struggle.
In 2001 it became a fully independent charter school, though with a holdover feature: Its teachers remained members of the city teachers’ union.
The Reiches continued to underwrite the school through their Beginning With Children Foundation. They later donated $10 million to help create the New York City Center for Charter School Excellence, with Mr. Reich as the founding chairman. Under Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who took control of the city schools in 2002, the number of charters jumped from 18 to 180, and New York became a focus of the movement nationally.
“We didn’t realize it at the time, but what we started with our Beginning With Children School helped launch the national charter school movement,” the Reiches wrote in an article for The Huffington Post in 2012.
Joseph Harden Reich was born on Dec. 16, 1934, in Pittsburgh and grew up in Charleston, W.Va. His father, Eli Reich, was a butcher who became an insurance salesman, and his mother, Marion (Klein) Reich, managed the home.
Mr. Reich met Carol Friedman when they were both undergraduates at Cornell University; they married in 1955, when he was serving in the Navy. He went on to earn an M.B.A. from Stanford University and landed his first professional job at Continental Oil in Houston. The couple moved to New York when Mr. Reich took a job as a research analyst with the investment firm Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette in 1961.
In 1968, he and a partner, Oscar Tang, founded Reich & Tang, a financial firm that focused on a relatively new investment product: money market funds. When the firm went public in 1987, Mr. Reich stepped back from active management to focus on philanthropy.
Besides his daughter Ms. Walsh, Mr. Reich is survived by another daughter, Janet Elsbach, and six grandchildren. His eldest daughter, Deborah Reich, died in 2013.
He had homes in Sheffield and in Fisher Island, Fla.
In their 2012 article, the Reiches noted that school-choice advocates were in a “political war” with teachers’ unions over tenure and accountability for student achievement.
The next year, a dispute between the administration of Beginning With Children and the New York teachers’ union over its contract, as well as concerns about sliding academic standards, led the couple’s foundation to sever ties with the school they had founded.
After a further decline in academic performance under new trustees, the Department of Education closed the school in 2016.
But the Reiches, through their foundation, never gave up their commitment to charters. The foundation expanded into a small network of schools, opening new campuses: Community Partnership Charter in 2000 in Fort Greene, and, in 2012, Beginning With Children 2, whose middle-school grades today occupy the original Bartlett Street building.
Both schools continue to enroll students from kindergarten through eighth grade; more than 90 percent of them are Black or Hispanic and from families in poverty. A high school was added in Downtown Brooklyn in 2022.
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